Yale

One Embraced Politics While The Other Steered Clear, But During Their Years In New Haven, Conn., Both Bush And Kerry Enjoyed The Occasional Beverage As Well As Membership In The Same Elite Secret Society.

July 11, 2004|By Todd J. Gillman The Dallas Morning News

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Both were big men on campus, tapped for membership in the same elite secret society. Both partied hard and had minor brushes with the law. Both were destined for high office.

The Yale men vying for the presidency this year, John Kerry and George W. Bush, led parallel lives in college, at a time when Vietnam loomed and America and the campus were poised for sweeping change.

But their personalities led them down different paths, in ways that now define the choice facing voters.

President Bush distinguished himself as a people person, mindful of his father's long shadow but comfortable with his own youthful aimlessness. The future Texas governor became president of his fraternity, a cut-up and the life of any party. He disdained snobbery and elitism, and detached from the erupting foment of the era.

Kerry graduated two years earlier, in 1966. He stood out as unusually serious, ahead of his peers on the big issues of the day, preoccupied with Vietnam and politically ambitious from the outset. Like Bush, he has confessed to drinking copious amounts of beer, though unlike Bush, his pals had to find the parties.

Both came of age before the '60s counterculture arose. In any case, Bush steered clear of politics. And Kerry's Yale was still very buttoned-down.

"If we had been there two years later, we probably would have come out as different people," said one of Kerry's roommates, Harvey Bundy. "People went to ROTC. We didn't participate in peace rallies."

The rivals arrived at Yale with remarkably similar backgrounds. Both were preppies and legacies -- offspring of Yale men and the Eastern establishment.

Bush is third-generation Yale, and daughter Barbara continued the line when she graduated in May.

He prepped at Andover. But having grown up in West Texas, where his parents had moved to seek their fortune in the oil patch, he always felt somewhat apart at Yale.

Kerry also had a daughter follow in his footsteps -- Vanessa graduated from Yale in 1999. They can trace their line to Boston's Brahmins, New England's early ruling class of traders.

Kerry prepped at St. Paul in Concord, N.H., after boarding schools in Switzerland and New England. He took instantly to the place.

But change was coming fast.

A new president, Kingman Brewster, took over in 1963. He changed policies to make admission to Yale more merit-based. The right family and prep school would no longer be enough.

The freshman class after Bush's was the first in which most students had attended public school. The year after that, the campus went co-ed.

The Democrat

But as Kerry arrived in 1962, Yale was still a place for bright young men in coats and ties and short hair.

He played varsity sports, joined a drinking society and a dining club, and immersed himself in competitive debating, which was pretty much his natural state.

He was on the soccer field the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when news came that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Kerry glued himself to television for days, mourning and naming Cabinet members and congressmen as they flashed across the screen.

Bundy, his future wife, Blake, and others would later joke about the Cabinet jobs they would get in a Kerry administration. "We always knew he was going to run for president," said Bundy, now an investor adviser in Chicago. "He had the charisma, he had the leadership. ... He certainly had the desire."

Gaddis Smith, who taught both candidates in his popular diplomatic history course (Bush earned a C-minus, according to a transcript that surfaced in 2000; Kerry's grades have not come to light), remembers Kerry as a standout orator. In the halls of Ivy, his style was a winner.

Highlights punctuate yearbooks from the era. One entry dubbed him the "mesmeric John Kerry." He became president of the Yale Political Union, the elite debate club.

His focus on Vietnam was intense. He would engage fellow students in endless hours of conversation, including roommate Bundy, whose uncles William and McGeorge were key architects of Vietnam policy under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

William Bundy spoke on campus, visiting their room afterward and drinking beer late into the night with talk of communist dominoes and the duty of bright young men to serve their country. It struck a chord for Kerry, whose father, like Bush's, had been a pilot in World War II. Kerry volunteered for Navy officer training during his senior year.

Yet long-held doubts about the war persisted. When he was chosen to give the senior class oration, he devoted it to a scathing critique. "We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving," he said.

The perception of Vietnam as a turning point struck friends as yet another sign Kerry was headed for high office.

"John was ahead of his time," said friend Dr. Alan Cross, a pediatrics professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "It was clear from the outset that he had political ambitions."